Where the River Ends Read Online Free Page A

decomposition is a slow process, it takes fifty years to add another inch of peat to the base of the swamp. The thick web traps the gas, building pressure and forcing the islands upward—like corks floating to the surface. As they rise, the gas is released where it glows like Northern Lights in its rise to the surface. In the mid-1900’s, visitors claimed the existence of UFOs, established tours and sought to sell tickets until scientists showed up and proved otherwise. Since their formation, the peat masses have been unstable and trembling—sort of like the earth’s plates but a bit more fluid—causing the Choctaw Indians to so name the place “The Land of Trembling Earth.”
    In English, it sounds like “Okee-fen-o-kee.”
    On the surface, it’s primeval and untouched. Uninhabitable to most men. For all practical purposes, it serves as the drain for the southeastern part of Georgia and northeastern section of Florida.
    Drain
is the key word here. Like all drains, there’s a limit to what they can get rid of in a given period of time.
    When the swamp fills up, the overflow spills out in two places. It’s a lot like New Orleans but with only two holes in the dike and with a lot less murder, gambling and prostitution. The larger pipe, called the Suwannee River, winds its way about two hundred miles southwest across Florida and dumps into the Gulf of Mexico. Her 130-mile little sister, the St. Marys, first snakes south to Baldwin, hovers across the top of Macclenny, turns due north toward Folkston, then makes a hard right eastward, where she finally spills her crooked self into the Cumberland Sound and the Atlantic Ocean.
    Given its tea coloring, the St. Marys is called a blackwater river. Two hundred years ago, sailors used to venture into the Cumberland Sound and run upriver some fifty miles to Trader’s Hill, filling their casks to overflowing because the tannic acid kept the water potable for long periods—like transatlantic voyages.
    In times of drought, the St. Marys River can be a few inches deep and a few feet across. At its headwaters in Moniac, it can be little more than a trickle. But prolonged rains—the lifeblood of the swamp—can swell the river’s banks, closer to the ocean, to more than a mile wide with “holes” thirty or forty feet deep. Normal flow rate might be a half a mile an hour, while flood flow might be as much as six or eight. Maybe even ten.
    Flooding here is a sneaky thing. When it floods, it does so from the ground up. Because the rain comes in from other places, the water rises beneath your feet without warning. One minute you’re asleep, moon bright, not a cloud in the sky with the bank sitting thirty feet from your tent. Six hours later, you wake to find your sleeping bag soaked and your tent three inches under water. Floods here don’t fall down around you. They rise up beneath you. Out of nowhere.
    Folks who live on the river usually ask two questions before building a home: where is the hundred-year flood plain and how do I build above it? Given that no insurance company in its right mind will write flood insurance for the St. Marys Basin, most homes are built on stilts.
    Even the churches.
    Despite this, the banks are dotted with homes, fish camps, swimming holes, marinas, rope swings, zip lines, whiskey stills, mud bogs and even one well-hidden nudist colony. Activity bustles along the banks like ants beneath the surface of their hill. From headwaters to sound, she is one of the last virgin landscapes in the South.

    T HE RAIN HAD SLOWED ME to a crawl so I pulled off beneath an overpass and pushed the stick into neutral. Abbie lay in the back, half asleep. Every few minutes she’d mumble something in her sleep that I couldn’t understand.
    The treatments are the worst. They whittle away at your core, strip you of everything and leave you with fleeting memories. She’d tried so hard for so long to hold on, but like water, it had slipped through her fingers.
    I crawled